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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29771622">miles away right here</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account'>orphan_account</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Goodbyes, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, M/M, Romance, artist!jean, poet!armin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 01:08:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,499</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29771622</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“But you’re leaving with Annie. And I get to stay with lovely Marco. And you’ll never see me again.”</p><p>“We won’t see each other again,” he heard the other man correct his words, though he had no idea the way he’d said them expressed something obvious.</p><p>“<i>You</i> won’t,” Jean shook his head, sitting a bit closer to his visitor and staring at him in the eyes. “Because I will see you in every damned painting I have of you. In every sunset. In every yellow tone. In every sea I travel through. In my fucking wallet.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Armin Arlert &amp; Jean Kirstein, Armin Arlert/Jean Kirstein, Implied Armin/Annie, implied jean/marco - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>miles away right here</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i wrote the poem in here last night. i just thought it fit them perfectly.</p><p>not many comments about this one. I'm just really sad after writing this help.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Armin had been to every single one of his exhibitions. Even when he hadn’t been able to visit his art at the small museums all over the country, Armin had managed to be there. With a big smile, with bright eyes and a lost stare, or just his back contrasting saturated sunsets. Whenever his muse hadn’t been able to see himself painted in those huge canvases filled with a life of his own, Jean had taken the time to show him. A picture, a video walking around the huge room filled with his art, or an audio recording describing what his Armin paintings looked like when his fellow writer was about to go on interviews or simply taking breaks from going online to focus on his next masterpiece. Jean understood that. However, he had to admit it made him fume that he didn’t get to be by the writer’s side, but he managed to get his head around it.</p><p>He couldn’t complain. He had a picture-perfect kind of life he would’ve never gotten rid of easily.</p><p>The loud ringing of his doorbell shook him from thinking things further. In his mind, neither Marco nor he deserved the loads of overthinking he engaged in sometimes. What they had was more than alright. It was enough.</p><p>Standing up from his stool, the painter left his palette on top of the minibar beside him, sprinkling some coral splotches on the marble-white surface of the kitchen appliance. As he shook his apron off and left it on the couch carelessly – something his fiancé had talked him through so many times before – Jean opened the door to the angelical face he’d been so used to painting. Looking not so angelical that time, however, the thin figure standing in front of him waved its right hand the way it always did. Whenever they were around each other, there was no need to say “hi”. It was always the wave/smirk dynamic they had been used to ever since they first laid eyes on each other – except their hair had gone through drastic changes and their eyebags started to grow bigger.</p><p>“Hey there, stranger,” Jean purred, regretting his choice of tone instantly as Armin ducked a bit below his arm extending all over to the doorframe. Cringing after his carefree attitude, he closed the door behind him and turned to find the writer looking at the photo frames hanging on the hall.</p><p>“Sorry about storming in like that,” Armin replied in a whisper, absentmindedly appreciating the takes from Marco’s analog Nikon. Pointing at the blocks holding some of their beloved cacti, he continued, “These are so cute.”</p><p>“That’s okay. Yeah, absolutely – Hey, why you here? Oh, man. I meant to say, would you like a cup of tea?”</p><p>When he heard Armin’s soft laughter covered by his left palm, the painter could’ve sworn the choir of angels he only heard in dreams came to his home for a private concert led by his muse.</p><p>“Always so straightforward,” Armin sighed with watery eyes. Jean did not know, however, whether the tears came out of laughter or any other feeling. “Would you mind if I stayed on the couch for a while? I need to tell you something.”</p><p>
  <em>I need to tell you something. I need to finally tell you that, after all these years, I’ve decided to end things with my girlfriend. I’m here because I’ve realized I don’t want to be away from you anymore. You make me feel so right I don’t want to keep myself from enjoying life with you any further.</em>
</p><p>“Something? Wow, never seen you so cryptic,” Jean stuttered as he walked over to his personal angel, making space on the messy couch by putting his apron on the stool.</p><p>“It’s just… very important.”</p><p>Judging by the sunshine-colored fringe touching the shorter man's furrowed eyebrows in a way that always scared him, the famous painter realized his talented partner wouldn’t break the greatest of news to him. Sitting cross-legged on the rug, right in front of his friend, Jean wondered how grave the matter would be.</p><p>“Come on. Whatever it is, you know we can work things out. Like we always have, isn’t that right?” He giggled his words through more awkwardly than he would’ve liked. Of all things, he despised being of no use to Armin.</p><p>“May I ask you a question?” Jean heard him say after a short silence was shared between them, leaving nothing but their eyes attempt at doing the talking. “I just know you’ll answer honestly.”</p><p>“I have no idea what this is about, man. Okay, okay. What is it?”</p><p>
  <em>I left Annie. I love you. I’ve wanted to tell you this for so long, Jean. Would you be okay if I told you I’m in love with you? I’m sorry I feel like this, Jean.</em>
</p><p>“I’m leaving for Russia next week. I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again. Not like this,” the writer mumbled the brief explanation as he moved his index finger between them, looking away from Jean’s hazel stare just to keep his voice’s consistency. “I thought I could come to see you guys one last time. I’ll really-“</p><p>“Miss us?”</p><p>“Miss you, yeah.”</p><p>“Miss me, Marco, or both?”</p><p>“Both,” Armin smiled, looking down at the color-stained clothes Jean sported. “So much. But you most of all.”</p><p>“Isn’t Russia too far away? Too cold? Too empty?” <em>Too impossible?</em></p><p>“Well, Moscow isn’t, as far as I know. Empty, that is. The other two are correct.” Jean heard the writer let his mind wander, weighing all the options presented to him in multiple interrogatives. “Oh, Jean, don’t look at me like that. The opportunity’s just huge. I’ll get to be an author of all my stories, finally! My works will be translated so that not only English speakers but also Russians can read me.”</p><p>“That’s huge, Armin, congrats,” Jean laughed breathily, finding it in himself to irradiate more joy than the pain he felt starting to drag him down. “Jesus. Who would’ve known?” Watching his muse’s smile falter, the painter opened his eyes widely and tried to mend the small damage he’d done unintentionally. “Fuck, no, I don’t mean it that way. Armin, hey, I always <em>knew.</em> I just <em>knew.</em> Shit, I figured you’d be an international phenomenon, but doesn’t Russia sound a bit random?”</p><p>While Armin stared into his eyes, Jean felt his cheeks redden after he figured out he’d rambled much more than he’d ever intended to around the writer. Clearing his throat, he looked at his worn-out socks with a longing look.</p><p>“Jean,” a little voice called out, making his head snap upwards to drown in two contained oceans, a turquoise shade in them inviting him to keep his eyes locked to the other man’s for a while longer. Getting a laugh out of the writer, he listened carefully. “I never said you-“</p><p>“You thought it.”</p><p>“How do you know? I just looked at you because people look at each other when they talk sometimes.”</p><p>“There’s this spark in your eyes when you talk about things you’re proud of, but when someone doubts them, it just disappears. Your eyes did that again now, so of course, I knew what you-“</p><p>“God,” Armin whispered, falling on his knees far enough not to harm the host’s feet, but close enough to sense each other’s warmth. “How will I do this?”</p><p>“You’ll take a plane next week with all those beautiful ideas, and you’ll write them and get everyone to read them. And I’ll even buy one of your stupid books in Russian although I won’t know a single word from there. Because you’re <em>that</em> talented.”</p><p>“Am I?”</p><p>“Yeah, but don’t get too comfortable,” Jean huffed, pointing at the black canvas he’d been sitting nearby right before his visitor’s unexpected arrival. “I’ll make it big, too, and you won’t even know it when my paintings are all over your house walls.”</p><p>“That portrait of Annie and me is in my living room, Jean,” Armin giggled as the spark returned to his eyes, lifting something in Jean’s chest the way his smile usually did. Except something in the words that had been said sounded wrong. He’d painted him with Annie. That was right. “You’ll always be on my walls.”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>“Don’t do that.”</p><p>“What? Why?”</p><p>“Don’t smile like you don’t mean it, Jean,” the writer sighed, unzipping his belt bag and taking out a napkin, most likely the least important piece of paper Jean would’ve pictured him carrying around. “Anyway, look, could I give this to you? I need to before I go.”</p><p>Although his eyes tried not to express too much, it became quite a hard task whenever he was around the shorter man. As the gridded paper blocked his sight from the marvelous blond kneeling just a few centimeters from his face, Jean took it with both hands and inspected it. Turning the napkin from one side to the next, unfolding it to find more text than the lines shown on one of the faces, the painter fixed the piece of paper delicately. Carefully enough not to break something that, judging by the rosy cheeks that decorated Armin’s exposure, would be important to both. When he found small verses written with neatly messy handwriting, Jean figured the layout hadn’t been relevant enough for Armin to rewrite the lines on a decent sheet of paper. It looked raw. Extremely sincere – just the way he still liked him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the napkin, Jean let his fingers toy with the edges as he read the small poem displayed before him.</p><p>The painter let his eyes wander over every curve and stop of Armin’s letters, while the main inspiration of his every painting stared at him. Wordlessly – as if the words on the napkin had left him that way.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>imagine taking someone dancing in a silly way</p>
  <p>i’m no professional dancer nor do i intend to be</p>
  <p>but wouldn’t it be nice</p>
  <p>to have you in my arms as we do our best</p>
  <p>swaying around just for fun</p>
  <p>and doing our best not to step on our feet?</p>
  <p>skipping steps, simplifying</p>
  <p>but as my eyes watch the sunrise</p>
  <p>through yours</p>
  <p>i realize there’s no need for perfection</p>
  <p>for our moves to be correct</p>
  <p>because there’s no music but the wind around us</p>
  <p>and the light in your eyes lets me know</p>
  <p>dancing with me is what you’ve wanted to do</p>
  <p>yet just like me</p>
  <p>you hadn’t thought it through</p>
  <p>until we found each other standing there</p>
</blockquote><p>“It doesn’t rhyme.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“It’s pretty, though.”</p><p>“I’m glad you find it that way.”</p><p>Jean’s first instinct was to stare at the kitchen clock as he simultaneously reached for his wallet, placed on the small, round table behind him. Pushing some paid bills out of its narrow insides, the painter left enough space for the napkin to fit well. One of its tips escaped from the leathered confinement, but Jean couldn’t feel pressured about it. In a swift movement, he folded his wallet’s flaps and returned it to the place where it’d been resting. Breathing in shakily, his eyes focused on Armin’s clean ones, though something in them looked different. New. Excitingly so.</p><p>“I’m guessing you have more copies of that one?”</p><p>“No, just wanted to show it to you.”</p><p>“Shit,” Jean rushed, reaching to the wallet with one of his hands, “I thought it was for me to keep. Oops. Wait a sec, let me-“</p><p>“No,” Armin interrupted him, taking his stretched hand and holding it with both his slightly smaller ones. “It’s for you.”</p><p>“Oh, thanks…” <em>my love? </em>No. He couldn’t know. <em>buddy? </em>No. Friendship wasn’t enough. <em>Armin? </em>No. Too distant. “Thanks, man.”</p><p>“Drop it.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“That ‘<em>man’</em>? Drop it. We know,” the writer answered, seemingly flustered as he squeezed the hand that remained in both of his. “We know this isn’t it.”</p><p>“But you’re leaving with Annie. And I get to stay with lovely Marco. And you’ll never see me again.”</p><p>“We won’t see each other again,” he heard the other man correct his words, though he had no idea the way he’d said them expressed something obvious.</p><p>“<em>You </em>won’t,” Jean shook his head, sitting a bit closer to his visitor and staring at him in the eyes. “Because I will see you in every damned painting I have of you. In every sunset. In every yellow tone. In every sea I travel through. In my fucking wallet.”</p><p>“And I will see you in my words, be it Russian or English. I’ll see you in every twist and turn that my letters make. I will see you in that portrait we have because I’m not leaving it behind. I will see you in the word ‘perfection,’ which I won’t be able to write if it isn’t in a sentence where your name is.”</p><p>Watching the ocean eyes before him dampen with every word Armin pronounced, Jean sat there with incredibly dirty hands. Pink decorating the tips of his fingers, Jean felt the paint still far from dry, leaving him with no other alternative than temporarily dying blonde locks in a stronghold. As his breathing hitched and he felt his heart jump out of his ribcage, Jean pushed himself forward just to let his face linger above Armin’s as if waiting for permission. He was wrong. They were <em>so</em> wrong – but Jean wouldn’t let morality get in the way just days before his light took a plane to somewhere on the other side of the planet. Feeling his nose hovering over the writer’s, Jean felt the adrenaline of the possibility of being slapped on the face, or worse, not being kissed back and leaving a traumatized friend. Nevertheless, when he felt his beloved man’s index finger and thumb tug at Jean's shirt for him to get closer, he turned fearless as his blood rushed to his cheeks unexpectedly.</p><p>Kissing Armin was as easy as just <em>existing</em>. It wasn’t as lovely as having Marco wish him good morning before work or as rough as whenever he and his fiancé ended up moaning into each other’s mouths to keep noises soft in the quiet of their bedroom. When Jean’s lips touched his muse’s, he knew it was a feeling that would be hard to relive with anyone else. He sensed how desperately passionate it was while the golden rays of hair growing longer on Armin’s hair blocked their kiss from being perfect. Grabbing both sides of his head with his multicolored hands, Jean licked the other man’s lower lip slowly, so painfully that his partner didn’t resist the need to go after the tip of his tongue in seconds. Unlike anything he would have expected from his crush of a lifetime, having him dominate the situation left him breathless, fighting everything in him not to break off the kiss too soon. He felt the poet’s tongue swirl around his, sucking it with a slow motion, pulling him in restlessly as if the mere thought of ending that kiss meant it would all be over.</p><p>But Jean needed to breathe for a bit, so when he distanced himself millimeters away, he kept his hold of the other man’s temples as he eyed thin, red lips hungrily. Counting to three slowly, listening to their breaths in sync, the artist felt the kind of joy he did whenever Armin stayed close to him. Brushing off a few tears from his eyelashes, Jean shook his head lightly and nuzzled their noses together, giving the blond some pecks on the lips while he tried his best to escape the inevitably long kiss that was could come afterward. He just wanted to remember the view of perfection that was present right in front of his eyes before it would be there no more. He felt the need for his brain to create a mental capsule, anything that could store the memory until his last days. However, he realized he was taking too long as Armin’s half-open eyes scrutinized his facial expressions with a frightened look.</p><p>“No. I’m just admiring the view,” Jean whispered, pushing some hair strands behind Armin’s ears with a longing look. He wasn’t sure if leaning in for one more kiss would make the situation any better.</p><p>“I didn’t ask anything,” Armin grinned tearily while trying to breathe in what was left of Jean’s scent around him. “How do you read me so well?”</p><p>“It’s been years.”</p><p>“Annie still can’t.”</p><p>“It never made sense to me,” Jean said in a low voice, caressing Armin’s head with soft strokes. “It all, I mean. Annie? Shit, if I’d gone to you days before, we would’ve –“</p><p>“No, Jean. Don’t regret your life.”</p><p>“I don’t,” the painter replied immediately, his words drilling into his lover’s mind almost visibly. “I don’t. But I’ll be damned if I said I don’t question it whenever my hands’ motion depends on the spaces between your fingers or your height. I question it every time your face comes into mind, every time I’m asked why I paint you so often. God, I wish I could make you stay here with me.”</p><p>“That would be impossible,” the writer sniffed as he worded an ineffective response to extinguish Jean’s daydreaming. Still, Jean knew there was pain in every syllable, for Armin had never liked anything to be impossible, so out of reach. “And now, this wouldn’t be us.”</p><p>“Us.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t want anything less.”</p><p>“I love you, Armin,” the taller man said with a strangled voice, feeling his ashy hair cover his face from potential humiliation. “I love you. So much. So not like a best friend but more. Not like a boyfriend. Fuck this – The love I have for you, I can’t tell Marco a word about this.”</p><p>“My love for you I can’t measure, yet we’ll both be over if you do. And with that, our love.”</p><p>“Would never do that.”</p><p>“But you’re an awful liar. You’re taking too much credit for nothing, Jean,” Armin joked, brushing his chin with his index finger.</p><p>“But if I stayed with you. Just imagine – I could let go of everything just for you and I could finally have a chance at doing things right for <em>us</em>. That ‘us’ you so well put before. The ‘us’ I’ve waited for so long.”</p><p>“The ‘us’ we’ll wait for,” the other man replied to his hypothesis, shaking his head as their eyes met again in predicament. The wait that would never end. “The ‘us’ we’ll wait for, the ‘us’ we’ll cry about, the ‘us’ we’ll never get to see after today.”</p><p>Smiling the pain away, Armin took his hands in his, laughing at the pink strands that were left on his head. It was then that Jean understood that, regardless of how many words he had for the writer, they would never be enough. He was not the one blessed with that skill. Armin could tell – He could just portray events of a past long gone and suffered. Helping him up, Armin caught him in a tight hug, hiding his wet face on the taller man’s chest as his tears dampened the loose old T-shirt he wore for every painting.</p><p>“I don’t believe in that bullshit, ” Jean started, crouching to look at his beloved muse into the pair of oceans that awaited him, “but I wish for us to find each other sooner in the next lifetime we live... if there’s any. To ever be able to have you here: in those photo frames, in your poems, in my bed every morning. I could give it all to make ‘us’ work.”</p><p>“If we found each other in this one, we’re bound to do so for the next million lives we could live,” Armin assured him, keeping some distance between them before he walked back to the door. “Because my heart will somehow always point to you, like a compass in the middle of nowhere. But now, no compass could keep us from everything else we render our love to.”</p><p>With a blurry vision, the painter stood still on the spot where he’d been left as the front door creaked open, showing Armin looking back, hurt and deeply in love. Lifting a hand to his lips, close enough not to let go of the remaining feeling of his love, Jean looked down, defeated enough by their fate to witness his lover’s departure. When he heard the door close, his breath got stuck in his throat as he looked up, trying to find any sort of reminiscing pieces of Armin yet staring at blank walls and a blank door. In the blink of an eye, it was all over – as if nothing had ever happened in the warmth of his living room.</p><p>Grabbing his wallet for reassurance and finding the napkin still folded inside, the painter sobbed quietly. Jean had a picture-perfect kind of life he would’ve never gotten rid of easily. However, for Armin, he probably would’ve.</p>
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